camel & needle easier than powerful accepting charity from the powerless

The conscience-lite version of the difficult concept of Agape is for us well-off people to give (tax-deductible) charity to distant 'poor' people we don't really like.

So most of find the difficult claims of Agape something we can reduce to manageable size.

Far harder to accept (and far more important than any version of Agape) is Humility --- accepting others as equals to our own modest talents.

Let us discuss humility as a version of 'charity'.

That means an incredibly difficult willingness, among us who are well-off and power-filled, to accept the 'charity' of help and assistance from people who are relatively poor and relatively powerless --- powerless people who might be filled with new and unexpected takes on dealing with life-threatening problems too difficult for us to solve on our own.

Accepting the poor and powerless as equals in problem solving makes it much more difficult to dismiss their right to share in society's wealth and power as well.

This is why even when nations are in life and death struggles of a total war, their existing elites show an incredible reluctance to allow powerless members of their societies to share in the nation-saving activity of  frontline combat roles.

After the war, they know that these minority group combat veterans will remind the 'stay at home/well off' (the two terms are often connected) that they saved their bacon in their nation's greatest hour of need and so deserve a share of their nation's power and wealth.

Modernity's professional/expert/priestly caste elites (medical scientists for example) are among those who feel most threatened by offers of help from amateurs when those experts face an important problem they can't quickly solve.

Here the twin problems solved by the 'amateur' Dr Dawson come to mind : curing incurable SBE and finding the way around wartime science's inability to synthesis life-saving penicillin.

This is because Modernity sold the rest of us two related bills of goods : all problems are simple enough to solve but all problems are also too complex for amateurs to solve.

Modernity meant by this that all reality was made up of 'problems' that were far too complex for amateurs to solve but that were also simple to solve, given enough time, when considered by well-funded, well-paid experts who are shown their due deference.

Solutions dreamed up by untutored geniuses and amateurs threaten their income and status.

Dawson's clarion call of seeking 'Help from All' totally threatened their 'Help only from Experts' .....